Bruce, if this is off point a bit I apologize but I think you are mostly right on the folly of MS buying Yahoo. My point is that MS should stay with there first few "Tricks".

Namely, operating systems, development languages, office, and databases. OK so they've been producing some of these for over 25 years so what's wrong.

When Cessna produced new aircraft back in the 50's through to the 70's the first new model was usually the best flying. After marketing got into the successful new bird and began to change the looks and features to suit the prospective buyer, many of the engineering innovations were lost. For example, manual flaps were replaced with electric flaps. Find and old pilot that has used the manual version and they always preferred the original manual flaps.

Autodesk has made this mistake many times with AutoCAD. They change the interface the designer uses to make a drawing without giving any extra bang for the buck. For example, I supported AutoCAD from 1987 to 1996 in a large manufacturing plant. Most of the upgrades added needed features, but broke parts of the application that already worked well. Occasionally I still get a call to help a company with a new version of AutoCAD that's not quite working yet. I usually find that the interface to a setting has been changed, but the product still works much the same as it did in the early 90's. After I figure out the new way to configure the program, the new version just works:-)

If I apply this to an OS, say Windows 2000 or XP. Both OS's worked well, but XP had trouble catching on because the interface had been changed to make it "better". What a real computer user wants is an OS upgrade that just works better. We don't want to learn a fancy new way to do the same work.

If Vista had just been more secure, ran faster than XP, and had maybe 10% new features to learn, I would be using it today. Instead I use Ubuntu 7.10 32 bit at the office and Ubuntu 8.04 64 bit beta on my home computer. VMWare loads Windows 2000 or XP when I do MS development or need a program that won't run on Linux.

Also, MS could learn from the new kid, Ubuntu and have 6 month release cycles. I'd gladly pay 20 bucks for a 6 month upgrade if it included extra speed and a new feature or two.

Instead, I get new service paks for free and continue to complain from blog to blog...

LOVED the article. I stumbled across it while researching for a paper I'm writing on mergers and acquisitions. I have selected several quotes to incorporate in to this project (and gave proper credit!) as I found this to be one of the best reads on the subject after MANY hours of research. It was brilliant!